Feeling Known

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?pagewanted=3&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130106&_r=0

So I've never actually written anything George Saunders has written. But now I'm adding him to my list.

"One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it."

I think that is one of the essential functions of art, of books. We all hunger, deep down, for some sense of connection. The feeling that we are not alone in feeling whatever it is that we are feeling at the moment - lost, maybe. Confused and scared and maybe even despairing.

The fact that someone you have never met and probably never will can lift you out of that self-pitying stupor through a line in a book or a phrase in a song and make you "feel known" is a certain type of magic.

To feeling known.

Tim Walker, Dreams, and Magic

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyne-politanoff/tim-walker-story-teller-photos_b_1970997.html?utm_hp_ref=style&ir=Style

With an imagination that knows no bounds, Tim Walker turns fashion shoots into fairytales or, in his own words, "daydreams into photographs."
-Evelyn Politanoff

I haven't read this book or seen this exhibition, nor am I really familiar with Tim Walker's work, but I love that phrase, turning "daydreams into photographs." It's magical, isn't it? Not to sound like a five-year-old (or maybe to bring out the five-year-old in you, too, so we can once again recognize magic), but well, isn't it magical? Turning a little bit of nothing into something...fluff into something more concrete. Dreams into reality, a little bit, anyway.

"Sometimes when you're taking a picture an extraordinary sense of luck and chance takes over and propels you to make pictures that you could't in your wildest dreams have imagined. This is the magic of photography."
-Tim Walker

I'm not much of a photographer, but I think I know what he's talking about when he discusses making something "that you could[n]'t in your wildest dreams have imagined," don't you?

To turning dreams into reality and creating what we can't (even in our wildest dreams) imagine. To magic.